Letter: Military spending

The column in last Monday’s Recorder, “Respect must be earned,” bylined by Susan Stamper Brown, was allegedly the product of Cagle Cartoons Inc. While it may be a cartoon, it clearly is the product of the Republican National Committee, Tea Party Division. It is absurd.

To cite the most obvious example: It states that “... 50 percent of Americans ... believ(e) the military is inferior, meaning they don’t have much confidence we’d be protected should another 9/11 occur.”

They don’t think we have a sufficiently powerful military! How many intercontinental missiles do they think would have prevented the 9/11 terrorist attacks? How many nuclear submarines? How many aircraft carriers? How many M-1 main battle tanks? Those are the items that our defense dollars are purchasing. Why? Because they are being built in the home districts of our country’s congressmen.

For one example, we have several thousand (the exact number is not at hand) M-1 tanks deployed around the world. But we have an equal number stored in depots. The Army has stated that it wants no more M-1s, which were designed for tank warfare on the plains of Europe and are essentially useless for fighting terrorists in the back alleys of Kabul. But Congress insists that production must continue — because it produces jobs for constituents and, therefore, votes for politicians.

The U.S. spends more on its military than the next dozen or so countries in the world. If that military is inferior, it is a management failure, not a financial one.